September 2024: Busy Bee

 

Greetings and welcome once again to autumn, when the bees are busy storing up honey to feed themselves on through the winter.

As for me, I am busy preparing for my first spinal fusion surgery (of what will eventually be 3) in a few weeks.  The injuries are old, but the discs are shot and the vertebrae are compressing the spinal nerves. I will be on restrictions until Christmas, so won't be running around the woods taking photos obviously, but will glean things from the archives to share with you for the next few months.  

In the meantime, like this bee, I am scurrying around like mad arranging for everything to be in place logistically so that it goes as smoothly as possible. I am really big on preparation, and always have been. It makes things recoverable even when they go sideways on you. That is one of the keys to successful photography, nature work especially. Plus it really fosters a sense of confidence. 

When I was a kid that was the Boy Scout motto: "Be Prepared." :)  It is a very good motto, truth be told. 

August 2024: Infrared Part 2

 

I think I am getting a good feel for this whole IR process now. It really does some amazing things with clouds in particular. Because I can not see in IR, I have to imagine the sorts of things that will appear in the image when I am composing. Sometimes I am accurate, sometimes I am way off, but I am getting better at it every time I shoot.

Learning new things is always enjoyable to me, especially when it is learning about things that human biology is supposed to limit us from knowing, seeing things that our eyes are not made to see. It is a reminder that there is so much more out there than we could possibly know, and that even science has its limitations in revealing those things to us. 

Hope your summer is enjoyable!

July 2024: Seeing What We Can Not See

 

So I bought another new camera...an infrared camera. Infrared light is not visible to the human eye, but it operates just as all light does, reflecting off of whatever objects it hits. So with a specially modified camera you can take photos which capture that reflection just like regular photographs, and translate them (a process I have yet to learn about) into the visible spectrum so that they can be seen. 

Technically what I have is a "near-infrared" camera, meaning it takes photographs of the portion of the infrared spectrum just barely outside the visible light spectrum. Farther out on the IR spectrum you get thermal imaging infrared, but closer to the visible light spectrum you get images that are visually closer to what we can see.

I am of course totally brand new to this, and have much to learn, but am enjoying both the challenge and the process very much. And I do like reinforcing the concept that there are things which exist in reality which are outside the ability of our senses to perceive. Because as much as we would like it to be, life is not black and white. It is not just color either. It is all that and much, much more.

June 2024: Laundry Room

 

This is an old laundry room in the former state hospital/asylum in Traverse City, MI.  It would not have been the institutional laundry room, but rather an occupational therapy laundry room, where they would teach the residents how to do their own laundry. They had a whole wing of a building dedicated to teaching things like cooking, cleaning, etc. 

What fascinates me about this particular room is that it was abandoned over 40 years ago, the paint is peeling, the walls crumbling, and yet after all this time there is still paper towel in the dispenser dutifully waiting for the next set of wet hands...hands that will never come.

I am very glad to have had the opportunity to go through these buildings when I did, as they are now in the process of restoring the ones which can be restored and demolishing the ones which can not. Access is now severely limited, as they are now active construction/demolition sites. The photos which have been taken by myself and others are the only records that will be of what these places looked like. 

May 2024: Waterfall

 Spring is fully underway here in MI, with flowers blooming, grass growing, and...water falling! It is nice to see more of the sun, and I have been spending as much time in it as I can.

Been busy of late, and am looking forward to a couple days away from it all this coming weekend. 

Not much to say this month, just that I hope that wherever you are you can take some time to get outside and enjoy the beauty of nature.

April 2024: Another flower

 

Yes, another flower photo. :)

It is spring here in MI, and while that means the weather is warmer it also means a lot of gray skies. It gets tedious and depressing, so I like to keep colorful imagery up to look at in order to provide some cheer and warmth.  Flowers are a good way of doing that.

Having a nice bunch of flowers in your house is a lot like having a cake in the house.  There isn't a rule that says it has to be a special occasion.  You can just do it whenever you want! 

March 2024: Peach Orchid

 

Since spring is apparently coming early here in Michigan, I thought I would post a flower photo to encourage things to continue along in that direction, and to help you all get in the mood for warmer, sunnier weather. Orchids of course are not spring blooms, however they are very pretty and in most cases quite colorful. 

I have been asked by a number of people about the images I post. Specifically, why do I not post larger images and why I only post jpeg format. These are legitimate questions, as larger photos are easier to see, and jpeg format lowers the image quality. One would think that a photographer would want their images to look as good as possible and to be seen as they were intended, right? Well, yes and no.

Part of the nature of the internet is that there is no way for me to prevent these images from being taken from this site and used wherever people have a mind to use them, without paying for them. If you were a car salesman, you wouldn't want people just showing up at your lot and taking off with the cars, would you? These photos are put here as *examples* of my work, not the actual works themselves, so I don't mind that they get taken and used across the internet. (And believe me, they do!) Because they are lower quality images they really aren't useful for anything but personal use anyway, so I don't have to worry about others making money off them.  And this way it works as advertising for me, without compromising the integrity of my work.  I also make sure to strip all the EXIF data from the images I post so that any question of ownership could be resolved quickly, as the original images I have contain all the data necessary to prove where each image originated and what its original form was. I am very protective of my work, and this is a good way to accomplish that protection while still being able to share examples of the images openly.  Additionally, it also protects the people who do pay me for my images, as those images are always going to be of much higher quality than ones which have not been paid for.  

So there is that. :)

Hope you have a great March!